As movie premieres go, it was a low-key event. There was no red carpet, no one arrived in a limo and the press was noticeably absent. Instead, picture a crowd of graduate students with rain-dampened hair shuffling into the Roone Arledge Auditorium at Columbia University in New York on a blustery Sunday evening. It was the kind of premiere you'd expect for a Japanese art-house flick or a four-hour documentary on rural electrification in Rajasthan. Instead, though, the film being screened was the first major feature to deal with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, on the big screen.

Two months after it was ready for release, and after it screened at high-profile international film festivals in Venice and Toronto, "11'09"01," the French-produced movie about the international repercussions of Sept. 11, can't get no respect in the U.S. Dubbed "stridently anti-American" by Variety, the movie is in distribution limbo despite the participation of hot international directors such as Mira Nair ("Monsoon Wedding"), Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Amores Perros") and Danis Tanovic ("No Man's Land"). The controversy is easy to understand, especially in light of the current political climate in the U.S. After all, if Susan Sontag can get dragged across the coals for drawing a link between American foreign policy and 9/11, and if Bill Maher can lose his "Politically Incorrect" gig for questioning the description of the hijackers as "cowards," then it goes without saying that a film that looks kindly upon the family of a Palestinian suicide bomber and calls attention to U.S. complicity in murderous South American regimes might stick in the craws of executives at Sony and Universal.

French television producer Alain Brigand, who conceived the idea for "11'09"01," says that he wanted to make a more permanent statement about the attacks than his own medium would allow. "It seemed that the rest of the planet had to be able to react, not just Americans and Europeans," Brigand told the French paper Le Monde. The concept he came up with is pleasingly simple, if a little self-consciously arty: 11 short films, made by 11 directors from 11 different countries, each lasting 11 minutes and nine se conds, plus a single frame. (The title refers to that duration, as well as to the date of the attacks as it would appear on a European calendar.) The filmmakers Brigand chose vary in terms of age, style and agenda, but all can be described as political. They include champions of the working class such as Britain's Ken Loach ("Bread and Roses") and Israel's Amos Gitai ("Kadosh"), indie directors with mainstream appeal like the Indian-born Nair and America's own Sean Penn ("The Pledge"), and rising stars like González Iñárritu and the 22-year-old female Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf ("The Apple" and the forthcoming "Blackboards").

Nair, who introduced the film at Columbia, said that directors "don't often get a chance to make a film that is so contemporary and immediate ... in a context of complete artistic freedom." Under Brigand's fairly straightforward conditions, the filmmakers were each given a budget of $400,000, the same standards for format and sound, and the same completion date. In return, they each had to promise not to produce anything that incited hatred or bigotry, or to share notes with any of the project's other directors during production. What emerged was "a very brave and interesting film," said Nair (whose strong links with the film division at Columbia had led to the screening there), adding, "which is perhaps why it will never be sold in America." The audience, mostly drawn from current and former students in Columbia's graduate film division, chuckled knowingly at this.

In fact, though, it was appropriate that "11'09"01" screened at Columbia, since what it resembles most is a program of thesis films by a supremely gifted group of graduate students. That is to say, it is patchy, sometimes brilliant, occasionally laughable and much too long.

The two segments of the film that have generated the most controversy are by Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and British director Loach. To be honest, neither is a transcendent piece of filmmaking: Both bog down under the kind of heavy-handed polemicism that can make a work of art wither on the vine. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not against films having a political message ­ I just think that the story should drive the politics, and not vice versa.) Loach's film revolves around the fact that Gen. Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup in Chile also took place on a Sept. 11 ­ in 1973. In the film, Pablo, a Chilean exile in London, writes a letter of sympathy to the families of 9/11 victims in New York, but the letter is a thin cover for a lesson about the atrocities.